email | betsybeadhead

When my father died there wasn’t a list of all his friends. He was very proud of the fact that he was able to memorize everybody’s address and phone number. But that didn’t do me any good when it was time to call them after he died. I had to go by the Christmas card list that my mom had. From that, I was able to look up some people’s phone numbers by calling directory assistance. This was 20 years ago.

Now of course you can look people up online. But sometimes that comes with a charge. It’ll get you near where you want to go but it won’t get you all the information. Perhaps there are privacy issues. Perhaps it is greed. Either way, it is annoying.

Now that my mother-in-law has died we have a list of all of their friends and relations to contact. But it turns out their list is not up to date. We can’t ask my father-in-law what the numbers are because he has dementia.

We don’t have some of the correct numbers because people have dropped their home phone line and gone to using a cell phone. And those you can’t look up online. We’ve even thought of using the cell phones of my parents in law to see if they had the new numbers saved there. No luck.

I’m starting to think that if they didn’t have the right phone number then maybe that person wasn’t that close.

Perhaps it is a good idea for me to start writing down my list of all the people I would like to come to my funeral, or at least to know that I have died.

It may seem strange, but sometimes the only way I have found out that someone has died is through Facebook. It’s the modern way of telling people what’s going on. Nobody reads the obituaries anymore. Nobody subscribes to the newspaper.

We have constructed our lives with emails and texts, and our computers and phones are password protected. How is anyone going to know who to call? Bills are sent electronically to email inboxes, and paid online with passwords and log-ins. How are our survivors going to know how to take care of our estate?

A difficult situation has become even harder because of modern conveniences.

It is hard enough to grieve. It is almost impossible to grieve and handle an estate at the same time. Nothing is normal, and then there is something really hard to do on top of that. Unraveling someone’s life is weird, and strange. It is like you are erasing a life, account number by account number.

I dislike the telephone. I’d much rather get an email. Or a letter.

Getting a phone call is like a home invasion to me. It happens unexpectedly. I have to deal with it right then. There is no time to compose myself and make sure I say the right thing.

Emails are slower. I can deal with emails when I feel like it. Emails are like the slow cooker where phone calls are the microwave. But even with the microwave I get the choice to turn it on. The microwave doesn’t suddenly spew out food and say “It is time to eat now!”

Phone calls are like someone showing up at my home while I’m relaxing in my jammies and them saying ok, now it is time to go out to eat supper with your family and your coworkers, no time to get dressed, and we hope you get embarrassed. A lot.

How did I ever survive before email? I guess I didn’t know any better. That creeping, sinking feeling in my gut was just normal. I didn’t have a choice.

It is like life before antibiotics and immunizations. You just had a few (hundred) people die every year. Nothing you can do about it, so sorry. We didn’t have a choice, so we didn’t think about it.

I get tongue tied when I talk on the phone. I get my wires crossed. My point doesn’t go across, it goes sideways.

It is part of why I made a rule that my brother no longer call me. If he wanted to communicate, it had to be by letter. Well, part of that was because he would say I said something I didn’t, so with a letter I had proof I wasn’t going insane, but that is another story. Some of it was to make sure I said what I meant to say.

I had a coworker once who got really frustrated with me that I got tongue-tied. She said “But you have a degree in English!” Right. I do. I don’t have a degree in talking. I write. With writing I can think about what I want to say. Then I can go over it and make sure the words say what I think they say. But with speech I don’t have that luxury. It is right then, no waiting.

I don’t text. Not really. They are too much like phone calls. They are a lot like emails, but more immediate. I don’t get the point of texts when there is something already like them around that works. I turned off the texting on my phone because I don’t want it and it costs extra. People still try to text me anyway and sometimes it goes through. When it doesn’t, they get upset that I didn’t answer. Texts aren’t like emails in that way. At least when an email doesn’t go through you get a message saying so.

Let’s being back letters. They can be personalized. They can have pictures and doodads inside. They can have glitter too. And for the paranoid among us, letters aren’t that interesting to the bogeymen.